Twitter is just randomly deleting people's lists – and no one knows why

Exciting new problem for microblogging giant to completely ignore

Updated Twitter has silently, and without warning, deleted reams of lists users have spent months curating. These lists are used by journalists, activists, and loads of other people, to organize and manage twits they follow and aggregate their tweets, links, photos, and videos.

They are, in a way, personalized RSS feeds of information from the Twitter firehose.

For the past several days, though, lists have been disappearing from folks' profiles with no notification, and no explanation from Twitter thus far. Some private, or locked, lists have been made public.

Great, @Twitter seems to have deleted my Turkey list and made some of my private lists public. 😐

Among those impacted by the cockup is Australian freelance journalist and Cryptoparty founder Asher Wolf, who said the issue appears to be tied those who use the mobile Twitter App. Switching to different platforms doesn't help access or restore missing lists, however.

Wolf added that in her case, the deleted lists represented thousands of hours worth of work and were a critical professional tool. "I have three locked lists that I scan for journalism, infosec and Middle East news. Those lists are gone," she tweeted. "My three biggest lists just disappeared. Decade of work. Other ppl also reporting lists disappearing."

Twitter, meanwhile, has yet to provide any update or advice from users who have had their lists go missing. The social networking site has not responded to a request for comment and no mention of the issue was made on Twitter's support account.

It's speculated the vanishing act was triggered by concerns within the San Francisco tech upstart that lists were being used to fuel online harassment, or organize serious crimes such as terrorism. Your guess is as good as anyone's right now. ®

Updated to add

There is a glitch and the glitch is real. A spokesperson for Twitter told us:

There is currently a bug affecting lists on Twitter for iOS, but people should still be able to see their lists on twitter.com. We are working on a fix and expect this issue to be resolved shortly.